The Current

A Characteristically Dark Speech That Failed to Explain How America Can Succeed

In advance of tonight’s speech, White House aides promised an upbeat Trump, a cheerful Trump, a man in touch with his inner Reagan. The rhetorical gestures were there, from time to time, and the bad metaphors: “A new tide of optimism,” Trump said, is “sweeping across our land.” (We are drowning in good feeling, America.) But it was not, in the end, the sort of speech that lifts a person’s spirits. It was the sort of speech that sends a person into a fallout shelter alone with his tax cut and his Second Amendment rights.

“We will never fail,” Trump promised, but he never explained how America can succeed. There was nothing in his speech to offer hope to “struggling communities” except to insist, falsely, that cutting taxes and eliminating environmental protections would somehow benefit them; and there was nothing to suggest to the many Americans he has disparaged that he sees them as part of a family to which he himself belongs. It was a dark speech—characteristically dark. Even stories that were meant to inspire were horror shows loaded up, like bad pulp fiction, with trains running over limbs, “multiple amputations” without anesthesia, torture, bombings, savagery, death. This is Trump’s world view: a darkness he can describe with relish and a hope that he asserts but cannot provide.